Moonage Daydream (2022)

This hallucinatory and often nonlinear 2022 documentary is a perfect salute to David Bowie’s life and career. Rather than interviewing those that knew Bowie, the standard convention for biographical portraits, director Brett Morgen mostly lets the artist’s images, performances, videos, and words speak to capture the essence of the artist. Bowie was more than just a pop star. He painted, sculpted, acted in films, and was a thoughtful and articulate person who gave sincere answers to even the most shallow interview questions. He was also a traveler, never quite seeming at home on this planet.

With mismatched eyes, a willingness to experiment with hair color and style, and a rail thin frame, Bowie always drew attention. But he shunned gendered attractiveness, creating his own space somewhere in between. In a 1970s interview, he wears an explosion of bright colors and geometric patterns. A single dangly earring sways back and forth. The befuddled interviewer asks if Bowie’s strappy sandals are men’s, women’s, or bisexual shoes, to which Bowie replies, “They’re shoe shoes, silly!”Whether he wore a one-legged form-fitting jumpsuit, a see-through mesh shirt, the world’s shortest tunic, or in the 1980s, tailored men’s suits, Bowie embodied androgyny. As he put it, “From micro to macro, from yin to yang, from male to female, there is no scissor cut, no absolute.”Bowie was always ahead of his time, unwilling to stay still. The film shows this, jumping restlessly from image to image, changing colors, using dynamic illustrations. Bowie completed the album Blackstar right before he died at only 69. I like to think that he did not fear death, seeing it as just a new opportunity for growth. But instead I feel more like the young fan in one scene of the film, crying inconsolably because she didn’t get to meet David Bowie, and he was so smashing!